The Pirate Bay is one of the few torrent sites that doesn't link to any infringing material on its homepage but that doesn't prevent copyright holders from targeting it. In one of its recent DMCA notices music industry group BPI asked Google to remove The Pirate Bay's homepage from its search results, marking it as infringing. Google disagreed, however, and refused to comply with the request.

In an effort to make piracy less visible copyright holders are sending dozens of millions of takedown notices to Google every month.

Music industry group BPI is one of the most active senders. Over the past year they’ve asked Google to remove more than 30 million URLs, and the search engine complied in nearly every instance.

Last week, however, Google refused to take down one link in a DMCA notice containing more than 2,000 allegedly infringing URLs. The link in question points to the homepage of the most notorious file-sharing site on the Internet, The Pirate Bay.

While The Pirate Bay is often targeted, this is a rather odd request. It is no secret that TPB links to hundreds of thousands of infringing titles across its site, but the homepage is not one of them.

The BPI’s notice however, claims that thepiratebay.sx infringes the rights of “The Music” but the page in question only links to a music category.

Google agrees that The Pirate Bay homepage is harmless and the search engine has refused to comply with BPI’s request. As can be seen below, thepiratebay.sx is the only URL in the entire notice for which no action was taken.

BPI’s takedown request

This is not the first time that The Pirate Bay’s homepage has been targeted by rightsholders. Four years ago Google briefly removed it from its search results after it received a takedown a request allegedly sent by “Remove Your Content.” Google later admitted that the removal was an error on their part, and the link was quickly reinstated.

At the time Remove Your Content claimed that an impersonator must have sent the DMCA complaint, but this is almost certainly not the case with BPI’s recent notice.

Over the past few months there has been an increase in DMCA notices asking Google to remove homepages of “pirate sites.” The MPAA in particular is targeting a lot of streaming portals using this method. Google doesn’t appear to see these requests as legitimate, as it refuses to comply with many of them.

In the BPI’s case it’s not known whether The Pirate Bay’s homepage was intentionally targeted or if yet again the mistake was the product of an automated takedown process.